While executing land surveys, surveyors commonly use a wide variety of equipment (e.g., a radio, a hammer, a chisel, survey stakes or other markers). Thus, surveyors must carry with them numerous items. While some pieces of surveying equipment are quite large, such as total stations, tripods, or poles, other pieces of surveying equipment, such as styluses, pencils, and hex wrenches (sometimes called Allen wrenches), are quite small.
Throughout a survey, surveyors are prone to misplace and lose their small pieces of equipment. Surveyors traverse a wide variety of terrain often in remote locations. For example, surveyors commonly survey grassy, forested, mountainous, or even snow-covered terrain. In all such types of terrain, surveyors are unlikely to find a small tool once it has been misplaced or dropped.
Surveying tools such as styluses, pencils, and hex wrenches are small, and losing such tools while in the field can be detrimental to a land survey. If, for example, a surveyor loses his hex wrench, he will be unable to calibrate a level vial when it needs adjustment. Unless the surveyor decides to sacrifice the accuracy of his measurements, the surveyor must leave the field to retrieve a replacement hex wrench, assuming that he happens to have a replacement readily available.
As a result, it would be advantageous for surveyors to have a dependable location to safely stow and transport small tools. Throughout a survey, surveyors commonly use different types of geomatics poles (e.g., a prism pole, a global positioning satellite (GPS) pole), and these poles commonly have a level vial support with a bubble vial to facilitate the vertical collimation of the device over a certain point. Given the convenient location of the level vial support along the length of the pole, it would be advantageous for surveyors to be able to stow various small tools on the level vial support. Surveyors could then safely transport their small tools into the field, stow the tools in a convenient location while in the field, and safely carry the tools out of the field, all as one unit with the level vial support and, if desired, with the pole.